ILLUSTRATION:
As American Christians we have a tendency to accept two aspects of basic understanding when it comes to the world as we know it.

• We can accept some form of what is called - High Religion - The study of things that pertain to God, Heaven, Eternal Life, Truth, etc.

o Now Americans may not agree on the conclusions about things pertaining to God but the vast majority of Americans associate themselves with some form of religion.

• Then we can easily accept - Natural Science The study of things that can be systematically arranged and observed following the operation of general laws.

But for most of the world there is a very well defined third category called Low Religion.

• This is the study of the interaction between God and Man in extraordinary ways.

False Views of Low Religion Include

• Eastern Ideas of - spirits, ghosts, demons, ancestors, earthly gods and godesses who live in trees, rivers, hills and villages.
• In medieval Europe these beings included trolls, pixies, gnomes, brownies, fairies, all of which were believed to be real.

All of these were an attempt to describe very real occurrences in the lives of people that could not be explained by High Religion or Natural Science.

According to Missiologist Paul Hiebert
Belief in the middle level began to die in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the growing acceptance of Platonic dualism and of a science based on materialistic naturalism. The result was a secularization of science and a mystification of religion.

Most Americans function on a practical level like the Sadducees of Jesus day
Acts 23:8 says - For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor an angel, nor a spirit…

They believed in God up in Heaven and the believed in the things they could touch and feel.

This lack of theology on this middle level presents two major ...

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